Starting off, my partner and I chose a topic, developed a PICOT question, and found some peer-reviewed scholarly articles. We thought our PICOT was going to find us a lot of articles at first, but to be honest it didn’t. So we had to change our PICOT question slightly. This was our original PICOT: What is the effect of both a properly staffed hospital floor and an understaffed hospital floor on quality patient care? Our new PICOT question is: In acute care settings, does a lower nurse-to-patient ratio [as compared to a higher nurse-to-patient ratio] lead to favorable patient outcomes and quality patient safety? We know changing our PICOT question was needed for us to be successful in our research.

A challenge that my partner and I encountered in the process was the difficulty in finding peer-reviewed scholarly articles that were relevant to our PICOT. Navigating CINAHL and limiting the criteria was hard for us. We overcame our struggle by rewatching the recorded lecture, reaching out to a librarian, as well as reaching out to our professor. The successes my partner and I have experienced are: time managing and working well together as a team. We have those successes because we have great communication and work ethic.

Our team process has been very smooth. We communicate and plan on what needs to be done and when. Again, I believe that communication has led us to be very successful. I’d say a challenge for us is time and having different schedules, but that challenge was solved again due to communicating when to work on certain things, when we both can contribute more, and balancing the work.